Album Review: Black Star by Amaarae

After 2023's spectacular Fountain Baby, expectations are high for Amaarae's follow-up. Black Star is lithe and nocturnal, all sex and drugs over throbbing, rubbery bass, her voice as skittish and ever-changing as before. It's strange then that in its opening stages it feels so lifeless. All the ingredients are there, but on tracks like Starkilla and ms60 they never feel animated with any of her usual sense of mischievous mishmash.

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In her 2023 cover conversation with CLASH , Amaarae spoke of her last effort 'Fountain Baby ' as an exercise in radical abandon. That sense of freedom was something the singer wanted to pour into next-gen African musicians walking the tightrope between tradition and idleness and art that was freeform and liberatory. "It's me pushing myself and the people I grew up with out of our comfort zones," Amaarae explained.

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Amaarae doesn't whisper to seduce; she whispers because she can. Black Star, her third full-length, is an album built from soft command: airy, controlled, often strange, and quietly assured in its ambition. The Ghanaian-American artist has always dealt in intimacy and eclecticism, but here, she stretches her reach into something messier, more transnational, more interested in tension than resolution as she enlists Naomi Campbell, PinkPantheress, Charlie Wilson, Bree Runway and Starkillers to strengthen the track list and engross the fans.

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